Another bad week for the global warmers went by. 

Early Snowfall

The unseasonably heavy snowfall in the Northeast brought an abrupt end to the screamers.  An early snowfall, remember, does not a trend make. However, it should give pause to those who have insisted that global warming was man-made, inevitable, and irreversible.  We all should remember that the climate has always been changing for reason we don’t fully understand. Those who were predicting a warmer Northeast simply got it wrong.  http://tinyurl.com/ye7beh 

Lack of Hurricanes

We have also noticed the remarkable lack of hurricanes to hit the US this season contrary to what the doom and gloom set were saying.  Even reputable hurricane experts were backtracking for having overestimated the number of hurricanes for this season. "It looks like the season's over," said Dr. William Gray, a Colorado State University climatologist, during a presentation sponsored by the George C. Marshall Institute, a science and public policy think tank in Washington D.C. Gray said he and his colleagues at the Tropical Meteorology Project at the university "didn't do so well this season" because they predicted much more hurricane damage to the U.S. in 2006 than actually occurred.http://tinyurl.com/ycd5gh

Lower Sea Water Temperatures

Closely associated with the decline in hurricanes in the Atlantic we now learn that the sea water temperatures in the Atlantic have declined.  Hurricane frequencies are closely related to sea water temperature.  The higher the sea surface temperatures the more frequent are those hurricanes.  http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/09/.  The exact reasons for the sea water cooling are not known, but we do know that the cooling is real and has been measured to depths of 2500 feet.  Further research is continuing.  Did the earth cool a little? Did more clouds form than expected, thanks to a possible weakening of the solar magnetic field? Where did the cooler water come from? These will be sorted out, but a big point is that at this time, we don’t know, not even the climate modelers.

Russian Peat Bogs

We have recently learned that huge Russian peat bogs are a major source of atmospheric methane, a gas more than 20 times as effective molecule for molecule, in producing warming than CO2.  These bogs cover 1.54 million sq. miles nearly one half the area of the United States of 3.7 million sq. miles. The authors go on to say that “As the incipient bogs were strong producers of methane, the findings help solve a long-standing mystery about the source of a massive infusion of atmospheric methane that helped raise the Earth's surface temperature following the ice age”. These bogs represent a huge natural source of this gas, and natural if unquantified contributor to warming.  http://tinyurl.com/y8a2nk

Cosmic Ray-Climate Connection

We have recently learned of another heretofore unknown climate driving force for our climate.  This is the relationship between the solar magnetic field, cosmic radiation, and cloud cover formation.  This was recently verified in the Climate Research Laboratory in Denmark.  http://tinyurl.com/mkzy2.  The correlation between solar magnetism and cloud cover had been observed for a number of years and was the object of intense research for an explanation.  This needs to be corroborated and examined by others, but this is a profound scientific breakthrough in understanding the mysteries of our climate.

Senator Inhofe Confronts Critics

Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma has been on the receiving end of media wrath for his confronting the unscientific and continuous exaggerations of the New York Times.  Senator Inhofe is well-informed on the subject having questioned numerous experts on the question of global warming.  http://tinyurl.com/yxtoax.  He has provided a number of examples of journalistic waffling (flip-flops) by the New York Times, without so much as a red face in their newsroom.

Consider the following from the NYT (note the dates):

1. February 24, 1895 NYT regarding fears of a new ice age; “Geologists Think the World May be Frozen up Again”.
2. March 27, 1933 NYT reports “America in Longest Warming Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise”.   
3. 1952 NYT reports; “the trump card of global warming has been the melting of glaciers
4. 1975 NYT screaming fear of a pending ice age; “Climate Changes Endanger World’s Food Output”
5. On August 19th of 2000 the NYT eager to be the most frightening news source about global warming announced that The North Pole is Melting. A boat load of tourists and global scientists reported seeing open water at the North Pole and the reporter John Wilford reported that “The last time scientists can be certain the Pole was awash in water, was more than 50 million years ago.”  A few days later photos of 3 US submarines surfaced in open water at the North Pole came over the transom at the NYT. See 1986 photo of 3 US submarines at the North Pole in open water here (http://tinyurl.com/tzhkc).

This is not the way any reputable source of information conducts itself.  Such obvious scare tactics by a newspaper with hundreds of subscribers to its wire service is dangerous to our nation.  

Psychology of Climate Modelers

It also seems instructive to discuss some extraordinary findings about the global climate modelers themselves and their beliefs and practices.  An anthropologist named Dr. Myanna Lahsen spent about 7 years imbedded with a “tribe” (as described by Roger Pielke) of computer climate modelers.  Her paper entitled “Seductive Simulations” http://tinyurl.com/ybby44 captures many of the problems today in the world of global Climate Models (GCMs).

The modelers can often isolate themselves from the real world if they get too emotionally involved with their computer models.  This is all too human in this type of endeavor when the over whelming driving force of the modelers is for their climate models to replicate the real world climate data.  They can literally isolate themselves from the experimenters and climate data, accepting instead the results of their calculations.  For example a climate modeler told Lahsen:

“There are many ways to use models and some of them I don’t

approve of. [Pause] It is easy to get a bad name as a modeler, among both

theoreticians and observational people, by running experiments and seeing

something in the model and publishing the result. And pretending to

believe what your model gives – or, even, really believing it! [small laugh] - is the first major mistake. If you don’t keep the attitude that it’s just a

model, and that it’s not reality . . . I mean, mostly people that are involved in this field really have that; they have the overtone that it is”. 

She continues:

Interviewer: They do tend to think that their model is the reality?

Modeler: Or even if they don’t think that, they tend to oversell it,

regardless.

Interviewer: And why do they oversell it?

Modeler: Because people get wrapped up in what they have done. You

know, I spent years building this model and then I ran these experiments,

and the tendency is to think: ‘there must be something here’. And then they

start showing you all the wonderful things they have done . . . And you

have to be very careful about that.

These are extraordinary findings about the modelers which show their efforts going terribly wrong.  Namely, it should be the actual temperature data, the climate data, and the physics data, which drive the modeling processes as well as any projections.  Instead the data are downplayed or ignored. This is the exact opposite of good science, and it is wrong to pretend otherwise. It is time for the global warming lobby to take a look at the actual climate data being discovered.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is Director Center for Science:Climate and Environment (CSCE) for GRIH. He can be emailed at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org